How to fix iOS 10 and iPhone 7 battery life problems

How do you fix battery life problems after updating to iOS 10 or upgrading to iPhone 7? Here are our top power-saving tips!

Apple currently offers the standard iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and the smaller iPhone SE. Between them, they're rated for 10 to 12 hours of battery life while browsing the web, checking email, and chatting. But if you've just updated to iOS 10, or you're upgrading to an iPhone 7, you might see a serious drain on your battery power. Rather than cursing and throwing your iPhone — as much as you might want to! — here's what you can do to fix battery life and get on with your life.

Wait for it

Whether you restore from backup or set up as new, your new iPhone or new version of iOS 10 could expend up a lot of power downloading apps, games, mail, photos, and other content. That's because the Wi-Fi radio stays on for a long time, and Spotlight — the iOS search system — has to index everything. When radios and processors can't sleep, power consumption goes way up.

If you've just upgraded the hardware, updated to iOS 10, or restored, give things a day or so to finish up and go back to normal. If you're fine after that, great. If not, keep reading!

Test on standby

In addition to the system taking a while to really finish transferring everything over, we also tend to spend a long time playing with new phones and new features. That's especially true with things like Live Photos, 12 megapixel cameras, 4K video, iMessage apps, Siri integrations, and more. So the screen stays on, storage gets written to, WI-Fi and maybe cellular radios stay lit up, and power gets consumed.

In other words, if you're battery feels like it's only lasting half as long, the first step to fixing it is figuring out if you're using it twice as much.

So, note down how much battery life you have left. Then put your iPhone down for 20-40 minutes. When you pick it back up, note down how much battery life you have left again. If there isn't a big change while in standby, you're probably okay, and your battery life will return to normal when your usage returns to normal (after the novelty wears off).

If your iPhone continued to drain and drain fast, even when you weren't using it, keep reading!

Reset

Rebooting, restarting, or resetting is the oldest cliche in troubleshooting. Because it works. Sometimes a good reset is all that's needed to kick bad bits loose.

iPhone 7 requires different button combo than previous iPhones:

If your iPhone 7 stops responding and you can't even turn it off by holding down the power button, you may need

Press and hold down the On/Off button on the right side

While continuing to hold the On/Off button, press and hold the volume down button on the left side of your iPhone.

Hold both buttons as the screen turns off, and keep holding them until the screen turns back on and displays the Apple logo.

For those previous iPhones updated to iOS 10, it's the same buttons:

Press and hold down both the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time.

Keep them held down until you see an Apple logo.

Let go.

On iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, and iPhone 6s Plus, the power button is located on the right side:

On iPhone through iPhone 5s, and iPhone SE, the power button is located on the top:

Once your iPhone has rebooted, repeat the previous steps and see if battery drain has returned to normal. If not, keep reading!

Tap on the Show Detailed Usage button to get a breakdown of foreground and background power usage.

Tap on Last 7 Days to get a broader look at power consumption over time.

It can be tricky to understand, but here's the deal: If you see iCloud Photo Library there, and you've just upgraded, it's a sign you're downloading thumbnails and things should return to normal when you're done. If you see Facebook there and it says 4% on screen and 40% on background, it's a sign something has gone wrong.

At that point, you can force quit a rogue app and likely get your power consumption back to normal.

Double click the Home button to bring up the fast app switcher.

Swipe to the app you want to force quit.

Touch the app card and flick it up and off the screen

If an app appears to be consistently misbehaving, you can try re-installing it or even switching to an alternative app or a service's website for some of your activity.

Restore as new

Sometimes restoring from an old backup, especially a backup of a different device like an iPad, can be less than ideal. Cruft builds up and things just don't run like they used to. Sometimes your once-fresh setup also goes stale.

If you suspect that's the case, you can suck it up and set up your iPhone as new. Yes, it can be an incredible pain in the apps, but if you have a significant and continual problem, and nothing else can fix it, setting up as new can be a solution.

It's the nuclear option, no doubt about it. You will have to set up almost everything again, including passwords and settings, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, health, and activities, but in most cases, your battery life will be better than ever.

Contact Apple

Every once and a while, you get a problem you just can't solve. Like any electronics, sometimes things go wrong. If you have AppleCare or AppleCare+, you should absolutely book a Genius Bar appointment and avail yourself of it. If you don't live close to an Apple Store, you can call 1-800-MY-APPLE in order to set up a mail-in repair.

Low Power Mode

If your battery life is normal but you want to get even more out of it, you can always get a battery case or power pack. If you don't have one handy, you can use Low Power Mode.

Launch the Settings app from the Home screen.

Tap Battery.

Toggle Low Power Mode to on.

You can tell when Low Power Mode is enabled by looking at the color of the battery icon — it turns yellow. It will automatically turn off any time you recharge above 80% or more, so if you want to keep it on, you'll need to switch it on every time.

You can also switch on Low Power Mode quickly by using Siri. Just say "Hey Siri, turn on low power mode!"

Extending battery life

If even Low Power mode isn't enough — you're stuck in the wilderness, at a conference with poor reception and no power — there are a few other hacks you can try.

Turn down the screen brightness.

Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute.

Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music.

Reader comments

How to fix iOS 10 and iPhone 7 battery life problems

So where's the solution? I've done all of this (I have NEVER left apps running on my phones) and still the batt lasts at most 4 hours--and that's just phone, text & checking email. Stupid article, IMO.

I have an iphone 6 and recently upgraded to ios 10 from ios 8, on ios 8 my battery would still be around 50-60% after 12 hours as i only really listen to music (through headphones) and browse facebook, snapchat etc for half hour at dinner, since updating to ios 10 im using my phone in exactly the same way and after 5 hours i had 60% left, i then turned on airplane mode closed all apps and my phone was dead by the end of work, ie when i used to be 50-60%. this is still happening a week later and ive changed all the obvious battery draining settings. is this common?

I have the iPhone 6+And just downloaded the new 10.01 operating system I guess it's called I'm not very knowledgeable about iphones but I am having trouble now with my battery power going low real fast what can I do about this and please explain in plain English for me I'm 62 years old and don't get all this OS 10 and stuff like that I would appreciate any help you can give me

I may be a Little late but i feel you deserve an answer. Usually the problem lies in the battery itself. This basically means that if you want your battery as good as it was you have to replace it. however, following the instructions given in the article can probably help your battery last longer.

Going though the IOS 10 betas was pretty horrible. Battery life on my 6 didn't improve until I wiped and started clean with 10.0.1 GM. So far 10.1 beta 1 has been great. Before reinstalling apps I found that location services were pretty aggressive, mostly system location settings. Turning a few of the biggest offenders off helped immensely, and I haven't missed them at all. Just something to check if you're struggling to fix battery issues in iOS 10 and already went through the obvious fixes

My iPhone 7 Plus has been running hot since it got it and takes forever to charge. The battery runs out quickly. I started the phone as a new phone at it did not resolve the issue. I measured the temperature of the phone and it reached 107F by the camera. I also heard the hissing sound.

My iPhone 7 Plus has been running hot since it got it and takes forever to charge. The battery runs out quickly. I started the phone as a new phone at it did not resolve the issue. I measured the temperature of the phone and it reached 107F by the camera. I also heard the hissing sound.

Are you running any always-on GPS apps? Try turning off Location Services for a day, see if that helps. If it does, try to figure out which app is the offender and uninstall it if you don't really need it.
Otherwise, take it back to Apple for an exchange.

It's good and bad. Good that you're calibrating your battery gauge for a more accurate reading. Bad that the chemistry of Li-Ion & lippo batteries don't like being drained to nothing (or completely full for that matter) But the good news is you friends at Apple do a much better job of monitoring and regulating your battery charging & discharging than other manf. Ever notice when your battery is "dead" and you press the power button your screen displays a "low battery" icon? It's not at 0%. And when it is full, and still plugged in, the iPhone knows to not constantly top off the tank.

Yes. And even even if you backup, reset, restore from that backup, your problems will likely persist. The best advice in this article is to give it time - you're likely playing with your phone more, which drains the battery.
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If you still want to try a reset, best to have all your contacts, notes, etc synced via iCloud, transfer all your photos to a PC (iPhoto or whatever) or buy & turn on iCloud Photo Library to backup all photos. Then in iTunes on your PC perform an encrypted backup, archive it, then Restore, as new phone. This will download a fresh, full, up to date installer of the OS then use that to reinstall iOS on the phone. Once you sign back in to your Apple ID on the phone, your contacts and notes, etc will come back. Then download the apps from the App Store in your phone, you'll get optimized versions for your device.
Then continue signing back into everything and changing all your settings to how you want them.
Good luck!

They've been do that a lot lately. I've seen some from 2 years ago. These articles are great to sent to new / not-so-tech-savvy users, rather than trying to explain it manually.
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I did a fresh install of iOS 10 on my iPhone 6, and battery life has been far greater than before. It was a huge undertaking, but it also fixed a big bug I caught with iOS 10pb - Unlocking would take 3-10 seconds.

Well there is some truth to what you've said, although I personally feel there are too many rehashes which make iMore just look like they don't have anything new to report. Even if it's valuable info, people can go look for some answers.

This isn't Android Central, there just isn't that much Apple news daily and there's nothing wrong with that.

RE: "iOS contains a terrific battery usage utility"
If it were truly terrific, it'd at least show per-app usage time/percentage since last full charge, rather than last 24 hours. What use would last 24 hours be when you likely charged the iPhone inside that time period?

I had to do a "restore - set up as new phone" through iTunes due to issues with iOS 10 PB. My iPhone 6 runs so much better and battery life is great. I check usage when I hit 20%, and it's usually 6-7 hours of usage, 12-14 hours of standby. I plan on doing this every year now with every major release; great opportunity to get rid of a bunch of garbage.

For nine years, I have never had iPhone battery issues, except after a new version of iOS is released, and app developers are releasing a lot of updates. To combat the battery issues from all of the updates running, I just shut off the auto-update feature for a while. I never turn off anything else. Maybe I get great battery life because I don't spend a lot of time on my iPhone playing games.

Low power mode is superb. I have it on almost exclusively. Even on iOS 10 beta it's showing great battery even when you factor in some gaming. Easily besting my g4 with significantly more battery by 6pm.

Yep, low power mode is designed _only_ when you really need to save battery, otherwise you're just running your phone slower for no reason. This is why it automatically actives at 20% battery and deactivates once the device is over a certain amount of charge

Be careful when restoring as new. I did a encrypted backup but when I tried to restore it stated my backup was corrupted. I lost over 19 gigs of photos along with other data. I was lucky that a 3rd party software was able to restore all of my data.

No, Gator352:s comment was valid. The one thing about Apple is what they advertise "it just works"
If this much tweaking is needed I might as well get a **** Android.
Not quite the quality of testing I would expect from Apple if this really is an issue.

Generally you don't need to do anything of these things, you buy an iPhone 7 then literally do nothing else. Low Power mode will also automatically be prompted to be turned on at 20% battery too. The only think I generally say to be careful with is giving apps permission to _always_ use location. Only allow it for _whilst using_ the application

With Android you can make it work but you have to be more careful about what you're doing. Apps that are open in the background on Android have much more control, which in one respect is good but in another it means that they can often be doing things that are draining battery or eating performance.

Another thing you can experience on Android is wakelocks, where even though the screen is off there is still an app using the phone as if the screen was on. Again this can usually be fixed by closing apps, but if not then reboot the phone (Android's battery manager should show you if anything's abnormally using battery).

And Android apps have much more control over the OS which means if you get something that integrates, like a Launcher then you need to be careful with that as well, and also apps could possibly contain malware which would use up your battery.

The general rule with Android is follow the same steps as iOS but also remember to close apps you're not using and maybe do a virus scan once in a while

I found some social apps caused issues that the Settings Battery list did not mention. Specifically, I tried out Snapchat for a week, and found it drained my battery twice as fast as usual. After uninstalling it, battery life was better.

hello my name is Osama i have recently bought an iphone 6s plus i have a problem my phone keeps turning off and when i try to turn it on it gives the sign that i need to put the charger even thought that some times battery is over 50% the phone does not open until i put the charger

So, what if Low Power Mode IS showing great improvement...what next since I don't want to live that way? Would next step be not LPM but just turn off Background App Refresh? If that works, then start removing one app at a time from BackGround app to identify the one or more apps that are draining the battery most.

For me LPM yields dramatic improvements, but since I can't permanently leave it on it's a big hassle. Now I need to find out what part of LPM is making the difference.

Excellent advice. I find some apps are sneaky. You will see the arrow in upper right, look for the app, and the arrow disappears. Good thing to check location in you apps to see if updates changed the app to always.

The app will tell you the first time it asks for location whether it wants to use it "always" or "whilst using the app", but a lot of people don't properly read this and just click ok, so it's good to check. The only ones I leave on "always" are the default Apple apps because I somewhat trust them to use it in a sensible manner

Rene, how much of a problem is Photos in the initial setup? My SE got very warm and the battery was draining faster than I expected and it seemed to be due to using iCloud Photo Library...so much so that I turned it off and am just using My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Sharing, which seemed to resolve the issues.

What am I losing by not using iCloud Photo Library [I have the 1 TB iCloud plan]? And how long would I have to wait for the initial setup to finish [I have about 13,000 images]?

A lot of that depends on your internet speed in downloading / syncing with iCloud. I've started backing up / restoring using iTunes when I switch iPhones because it is so much faster. I still have iCloud backups, but I go to iTunes first when switching devices.